"...not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence." -John Berger

Welcome Friends, Seekers, Artists, Seers, Howlers

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters [2]

PORTRAITS

What happened to Howard’s portrait of you? I wanted that painting. Spirits helped Howard. ‘Sometimes When I’m painting, I hear a voice, a woman’s. Calling Howard, Howard – faint, far-off, Fading.’ He got carried away When he started feeding his colours Into your image. He glowedAt his crucible, on its tripod. How many sessions? Yaddo fall. Woodstoves. Rain, Rain, rain in the conifers. Tribal conflict Of crows and their echoes. You deepened, Molten, luminous, looking at usFrom that window of Howard’s vision of you. Yourself lifted out of yourselfIn a flaming of oils, your lips exact.

Suddenly – ‘What’s that? Who’s that?’ Out of the gloomy neglected chamber behind you Somebody had emerged, hunched, gloating at you, Just behind your shoulder – a cowled Humanoid of raggy shadows. Who? Howard was surprised. He smiled at it. ‘If I see it there, I paint it. I like it when things like that happen. He just came.’

I saw it with horrible premonition. You were alone there, pregnant, unprotectedIn some inaccessible dimension.

* * *

ISIS

The morning we set out to drive around America She started with us. She was our lightest Bit of luggage. And you had dealt with Death. You had come to an agreement finally: He could keep your Daddy and you could have a child.

Macabre debate. Yet it had cost you Two years, three years, desperate days and weepings. Finally you had stripped the death-dress off, Burned it on Daddy’s grave. Did it so resolutely, madeSuch successful magic of it, Life Was attracted and swerved down – Unlikely, like a wild dove, to land on your head. Day of America’s IndependenceYou set out. And I, not Death, Drove the car.

Was Death, too, part of our luggage?Unemployed for a while, fellow traveller?Did he ride on the car top, on the bonnet?Did he meet us now and again on the road, Smiling in a café, at a gas station? Stowaway in our ice-box? Did he run in the wheel’s shadow?

Or did he sulk in your papers, back in your bedroom, Waiting for your habitsTo come back and remember him? You had hidden him But your blossom had fruited and in England It ripened. There your midwife, The orchardisr, was a minature Indian ladyBlack and archaic, half-Gond, With her singing manner and her lucky voice charm, A priestess of fruits.Our Black Isis had stepped off the wallShaking her sistrum – Polymorphus Daemon, Magnae Deorum Matris – with the moonBetween her hip-bones and crowned with ears of corn.

The great goddess in person Had put on your body, waxing full, Using your strainingsLike a surgical glove, to create with,Like a soft mask to triumph and be grotesque in On the bed of birth.

It was not DeathWeeping in you then, when you lay among bloody clothsHolding what had come out of you to cry.

It was not poetic death Lifted you from the blood and set you Straightaway lurching – exultant – To the phone, to announce to the worldWhat Life had made you,Your whole body borrowedBy immortality and its promise, Your arms filled With what had never died, never known Death.